Secured growth

At the first opportunity, India should conduct Pokharan III tests, says N.V.Subramanian.

By N.V. Subramanian (14 December 2009)

14 December 2009: Obviously, the Manmohan Singh government considers the Indian deterrent as a joke. Why else would Anil Kakodkar, less than a fortnight after retiring as the Atomic Energy Commission chairman, speak so cavalierly about India's thermonuclear weapons, and rather than still doubts about them, unintendedly blow them apart as duds?

The story may be familiar to most of our readers, but it is important to repeat it to set the context. K.Santhanam, a former DRDO top scientist, blew the whistle on Indian's thermonuke test during Pokharan II, saying it did not give the desired yield of forty-five kilotons. That yield is less even for a diminished thermonuke, but Santhanam says even that yield was not reached.
What Santhanam revealed more than eleven years after the test has been fairly well-known in the strategic community, and even this writer has alluded to it often in the past, but especially during the public debate over the Indo-US nuclear deal. This writer's position was (and remains) that the nuclear deal, once operationalized (which it hasn't been), would permanently bind India to its unilateral moratorium not to test, which would be a perilous course to take considering that the thermonuclear weapon tested in May 1998 did not perform. Santhanam, who was closely associated with the test from the DRDO side, broke his silence about the dud thermonuke some months ago. Now Kakodkar has waded into the controversy again.
Kakodkar, hoping to satisfy the military which has been alarmed by Santhanam's whistle-blowing, said that the Indian army ought to have "full confidence" in the deterrent. He added that the controversial thermonuke measured upto its designed parameter in all respects, and claimed Santhanam was not intimately involved with the Pokharan II test. He concluded that India has not just one but several thermonukes ranging from low to two-hundred kilotons. Santhanam retaliated by calling Kakodkar a liar. Such exchanges hardly lend confidence to India's deterrent, even after Kakodkar shot off his mouth by giving a broad idea of the country's thermonuke inventory, for which he should be roundly censured.
Deterrence is at the core of the psychological war that nuclear weapons' states prosecute against one another. For that psychological war to succeed, adversaries must be forever reminded that the nuclear weapons in contention work to their designed destructive power, and one way of reminding is by continually testing the weapons and refining them. Thermonukes are very complicated weapons, involving at a minimum a fission bomb that ignites a companion thermonuclear device. All the NPT nuclear weapons' states have repeatedly tested their thermonukes for perfection, and thermonuke warheads are the mainstay for long-range missiles, because they give the most bang for the buck.
It is beyond doubt that India's first thermonuclear explosion at Pokharan II failed. This is not something to be ashamed of. India is not the recipient of tested proliferated technologies like Pakistan has been (from China) or perhaps even Israel. So failures are anticipated, as happened in the initial phase of the missile programme. If you fail once, you test again, and go on testing until you get it right. If you don't have a tested deterrent, you should not prosecute that psychological war mentioned above, because when push comes to shove, you have nothing to show, and you may have to cave in to nuclear blackmail.
The fact that Pakistan has prosecuted a terrorist war against India since 1987, first in Jammu and Kashmir and then in the rest of the country, advertises that we have succumbed to Pakistan's nuclear blackmail even while having a store of tested fission weapons. Without thermonukes, India's second-strike capability against Pakistan -- embedded with the doctrine of "massive retaliation" -- is horrendously compromised. Thermonukes are even more critical to deter China, because China employs Pakistan to nuclearly blackmail India, while undertaking its own strategic competition with this country. If India's thermonukes are not confidence-giving -- as the latest abusive Kakodkar-Santhanam exchanges render it again -- how do we imagine we are deterring China?
The more the Manmohan Singh government tries to defend the dud thermonukes, the more casualty will the Indian deterrent suffer. The only course is that India, citing supreme national interest (which the growing crisis in relations with Pakistan and China wholly justify), authorizes Pokharan III at the earliest possible. Fresh trouble has erupted on importing US power reactors. Indian jurists are opposed to the impending law that limits the liability of foreign reactor manufacturers and operators in the event of a nuclear accident. Without this law, US reactor manufacturers won't come to India, and given the scale of the Bhopal gas tragedy, this will become politically impossible to legislate. Which means no US reactors in the foreseeable future. Even without this, the Barack Obama administration seems not the least inclined to operationalize the Indo-US nuclear deal.
In conclusion, the Manmohan Singh government can afford to be bold in facing up to US pressure either before (assuming the test preparations are leaked) or after Pokhran III, especially if the supreme national interest clause is invoked. It is often forgotten that unless India is secure, its growth would be ever plagued with insecurity and uncertainty and thus compromised. So it is important to understand the intimate link between Pokharan III and India's unimpeded and secured growth.
N.V.Subramanian is Editor, www.NewsInsight.net, and writes internationally on strategic affairs. He has authored two novels, University of Love (Writers Workshop, Calcutta) and Courtesan of Storms (Har-Anand, Delhi).
Please visit N.V.Subramanian's blog http://courtesanofstorms.blog.com/ and write to him at envysub@gmail.com

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